Religious Education

R.E. at Mora

Brent is the most diverse Borough in Europe. There is a wide range of religious traditions within our communities and amongst the children in our school. We want Mora pupils to have a positive understanding of religions in their community by understanding how belonging to an organised religion can affect many aspects of a person’s life, their beliefs, traditions, clothes, food, names, times and ways of celebration, and what is considered important in life. We want pupils to leave our school with an understanding of the similarities and differences in religious traditions and an understanding too that not everyone chooses to follow an organised religion.

We therefore have an enquiry-based RE curriculum.  This means that in every year group we respond to BIG questions on a termly basis. BIG questions are meaningful questions that explore both general and religious concepts. For example, How did we get here? (Y1) Who is to blame if we do wrong? (Y5) . We seek to answer those questions through pupils’ personal knowledge and experiences, to consider the diverse experiences/knowledge of class-mates and to look at how the questions are answered in particular religions e.g. Judaism, Islam.

As such, our approach in answering the BIG questions, is three-pronged:

• Personal knowledge – pupils own knowledge/experience is of central value and we take great interest in discovering the similarities and differences in our beliefs or non-beliefs and how we practise them

• Disciplinary knowledge – we create opportunities for pupils to explore and develop the skills of comparing, questioning, analysing, evaluating their own beliefs or non-beliefs and others in their class
• Subject knowledge – pupils explore the beliefs, traditions, food, ceremonies in the key religions in our borough, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism and Buddhism.

 The learning journey begins in Year 1 and takes a linear path through to Year 6, building each term and each year on previous learning in both the philosophical disciplines (the BIG question) and in subject knowledge.

Pupils attend places of worship and visitors from different faiths are encouraged into school to describe their lived experiences and to answer children’s questions.

Throughout the year, special events are celebrated at school through music and food, for example, Mora’s hugely popular community Iftar dinner, Christmas lunch, whole school Diva making, Hannukah doughnuts and more!